Attribute Importance Determination of the Customer Needs for Product Family Based on Axiomatic Design and Conjoint Analysis

Abstract

AbstractAccurate acquisition and expression of customer requirement information are primary step of product family planning under mass customization. In this paper, aiming at requirements information with the characteristics of abstractness and vagueness in the process of constructing requirements model, the descriptive demand model of the customers was built. Axiomatic design and quality function deployment were employed to map between customer needs (CNs) and functional requirements (FRs) as well as between functional requirements and design parameters (DPs). The fuzzy demands were quantified through conjoint analysis and transformed into the specific indicators and parameters of product design. Orthogonal experimental design method was applied to crease a series of conceptual product combinations. According to the customer's preference for conceptual products, they were decomposed into horizontal utility values for all functional attributes, which was solved by the least square method with virtual variables. Then the relative importance between attributes was determined. Finally, an example on the cylindrical gear reducer was provided to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.KeywordsProduct familyCustomer needAxiomatic designConjoint analysis